Development of an R Package for Syndromic Surveillance: Translating Research into Tools for the Veterinary Epidemiologist

We suggest there are currently three main challenges in the development of animal syndromic surveillance: the lack of standards in disease classification, the development of statistical methodologies appropriate to deal with animal data, and the creation of ready-to-use tools that employ these statistical methods. We address the latter by incorporating already developed methods into an easy to use R package that contains all the tools for implementation of an animal syndromic surveillance system; from data retrieval, management and analyses to the construction of a user interface.